Cancer is an emotive event, emotive because despite its obtrusion into the body the assault is on the experiential realm of one’ being. The natural whim to survive or just be attains a new perspective. This book is about how we incisively take recourse to the experiences of a new meaning. Empathetically dwelling on the emotional pain of cancer diagnosis, the need to purge, the need to vent out to something one is conversant with becomes necessary. Making the need for skilled communication even more urgent, this emphasizes the role of the physician from a paternalistic one into one who naturally flows into the rhythm of the healing process. The protean nature of depression related to cancer also demands that more meaning-oriented psychotherapies need to be embraced to assuage the person at any given stage of the disease. Studies from the 60s and recent ones have shown how psychedelic substances can incite spiritual and existential insights, and can alter the dying experience of a person into a process of spiritual growth. The ethical demands entrenched with this form of therapy is under immense speculation and the book dwells on this from the terminally ill person’s perspective. With the proclivity to heal, art is also cathartic, as it allegorically allows the perceiver the liberty to self-heal. Extending this to the repository of self- experience, we have delved into how this act can mobilize the throes of the human emotion and compel one to re-engage with the world; something necessary to reckon with one’s being.

Table of Contents

Preface / The Newly Diagnosed Patient. What we say, how we say it, and what they Expect? / Decision Making in Cancer Patients – Choice and Uncertainty / Strategies and Structures to enhance Psycho-oncology ´s impact in Clinical Cancer Treatments / Living through the Grind of Therapy Depression and the Situational Crisis in Cancer and the role of Meaning Centered Psychotherapy / Psychedelics in the Palliative Care of Terminally Ill Cancer Patients / The Metaphysical Combat with Death in the Terminally Ill and the Psychedelic Trail / Can we have a Directive or a Consensus on “End of Life issues?” Are we actually listening and can we reach out? / "Why should the Fictional Narrative Permeate the Death Experience in medicine: A glance at Lev Tolstoy's “Death of Ivan Illych" through Merleau Ponty's “Phenomenological Overtures” / The Convalescent’s Diary-Art and its Possibilities in Psycho-Oncological Health.